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China has emerged as one of the 21st century's most consequential nations, making it more important than ever to understand how the country is governed.
Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system. I'm Jude Blanchett, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. And this week, I'm delighted to be joined by David Hoffman, a senior advisor with the China Center for Economics and Business at the Conference Board. He is also a non-resident senior associate with us at the Freeman Chair at CSIS. Today, we'll be discussing a range of issues around China's economy, political economy, and David's perspectives on the evolving business environment in China.
David, thanks for joining us. It's great to be here, Jude. So ordinarily, I would go right into asking a biographical question. But in this instance, I just have to say to listeners that I think very few individuals have exacted as much of an influence on my thinking of China as has David Hoffman, who was my boss and mentor at the conference board when I worked at the China Center for Business and Economics. And I was just profoundly lucky to have David as a tutor and teacher and guide and
on the ground there in China. So as I think about the various schools of thought that have impacted me, one is UCSD under comrade Susan Shirk and the great cadre of researchers and intellects there, Barry Naughton, Victor Scher, and the other is David and the conference board, another school of thought. So David, just thank you for all that you've done to teach me and be patient with
from a young Padawan trying to make sense of China really did have an enormous impact on me. Gosh, that's incredibly gracious, Jude. Thank you so much. But it was equally just fantastic to work with you. I loved that whole experience. So thank you. So let's get into the biography question here. And luckily, there's an intersection between both the
schools of thought that were important to me, UCSD and the conference board. David, you sit at the nexus of both of those. So how did you get interested in China? A bit about your background and how you got to where you are today. Yeah, well, thank you. I grew up in Hawaii, which is very Asian, as you know, and my father was a big proponent of learning Chinese. So I went into UCSD, a student of economics and also a student of Chinese language.
And that inevitably took me into some of the emergent Chinese studies courses at the time. And I think it might have been even as early as freshman year that I luckily took a contemporary Chinese history course. It might have been the Republican period. We were on a trimester system at UCSD then, and it was a Paul Pickowitz course.
And I don't know if you've ever experienced one of his lectures, but their storytelling to the nth degree, it's amazing, riveting actually.
And that was it. Basically, from there, I just populated everything I could with Chinese economics, Chinese political science, Chinese history, and tilted my whole degree in that direction. And happened to work with Susan Shirk, did all her political science courses at the time. She became my undergraduate thesis advisor. I wrote on elite politics and
the Gang of Four, studying Andrew Nathan and others who were pivotal thinkers at the time, Michael Oxenberg.
and others. And then I eventually got a job as a young expert to help set up a joint venture graduate school in China called Yellow River University, Huanghe, Asia, which is still mysterious to me to this day, actually. But it was a joint venture graduate school set up in '85 by a group of UC professors, kind of informally. So Susan introduced me to the opportunity.
And this was teaching for liberal arts masters, which was already very unusual in China at the time. Almost all of the leaders were engineers, as you know. It was actually under the central Zhao Yubu, the Ministry of Education. Li Peng was at the time the Minister of Education.
They put this in the middle of nowhere because it was considered sensitive in Ergunan province in Zhengzhou, literally on the bank of the Yellow River. That's where it all started. That's where the language really became a meaningful study for me and where the experience was just so incredible and visceral and difficult and fruitful that I never turned back. Like many others, I went there for a year and stayed for 31 years.
And just for listeners, David just had mentioned Paul Pickowitz and just as a mini 30 second tribute to say Paul was a credibly distinguished historian, a
at UCSD. He did his PhD dissertation in Wisconsin. He did it under Maurice Meisner, who himself was an absolutely brilliant historian of modern China. And I forget when Paul retired. It wasn't that long ago. Just a couple of years ago. Yeah. But in the 70s, Paul, along with Ed Friedman, Mark Seldon, were pioneers of this local village case studies. And they wrote a number of really phenomenal books. Chinese Village Social Estate was one of them. I forget the other
Revolution, Something in Reform in a Village in China was another one. So just some really path-breaking works. But yeah, Paul was an extraordinarily dynamic lecturer, teacher, and just a really wonderful human being. It was the real center of the history department. His stuff is just still worth engaging with and reading with. For folks who aren't familiar with his work, I would highly recommend going out and finding and buying some of it.
He did an amazing course called Film and Fiction in Contemporary China. He, for some reason, I mean, I think he told me the story, but he amassed the largest library of silent and very early sound-based films from China of the 20s, 30s, and 40s. And you'd read the fiction of the era, which was written for the 0.001% who were literate,
and you'd watch the films of the era for the other Lao Pai Xing, and you try to piece together history from those two views. And to this day, I think it's probably the best, you know, the most intense learning experience I've ever had.
So David, there's so many things that we could talk about today, and we will, but I wanted to start by asking you for your assessments of the recent third plenum. We're recording this on July 23rd. The plenum decision document came out just two days ago, and the plenum wrapped up last week. High-level impressions of the plenum, and I think also looking at this historically, thoughts on what this plenum tells us.
terms of its priorities, and what that means just in terms of how historically different Xi Jinping is from previous leaders in terms of his priorities for the economy. I'm just struck by how this plenum decision feels very Xi Jinping, but it's pretty remarkable how much China has evolved since he's come to power. And the third plenum document is a sort of lens into seeing just how far it's evolved. But what were your impressions?
Yeah, I mean, I guess at a very high level, I wasn't surprised by the outcome. I did not expect a pivot towards consumption. I didn't expect any major reforms in a marketization sense. And I think the whole thing really spells pretty significant reversion.
to a planned economy. And we could debate how extensive the plan is, but we are clearly embarked on a pathway to a highly planned, some might argue it's already there, if not completely planned economy that, you know, at some point could involve a certain degree of renationalization. You know, it won't be called that, but it in practice will be that way where you'll see the state
having control of the major real estate developers, the major VCs and private equities. Everything will be primarily state-controlled, if not state-owned. And that would be my high-level view. So looking at it from the conference board vantage point, my task is to try to figure out where the play space is
for foreign investors in in this evolving unreformed environment and i would say my thinking is pretty nascent there but that's what i'm focused on going forward from this plenum
Can you drill down a bit, David, on that? Where you see the intersection of planning and markets in terms of the macro thinking and the economy in China, Barry Naughton calls this steerage. This is not a return to Gauss plan. This is not running equations on a blackboard about how many tons of ingot should be produced where at what price. But obviously, this is a pretty significant reversion to comfort with state guidance from where we were 10 or 15 years ago. So how would you summarize this?
where markets are acceptable, where they're not. If this is planning, how much planning? It's just hard to make sense. That's a very good point. I think there is, to a certain degree, consumer markets are still open. Industrial markets seem to be closing. That doesn't mean all opportunity for foreign investors is diminishing. There are still valuable roles that foreign investors can play.
But planning on the science and technology side, the industrial side, the manufacturing side, I think has taken on a very strong element of top-down direction, what Xi Jinping has always called top-level design.
Kind of going back to when he came into power, I think you and I, we were there at the time, were very excited in the run-up to the third plenum. Then, if you remember in 2013, when I think they formed seven task forces, each one looking at different aspects of reform, fiscal, who, co, other things, populated by a lot of the sort of more progressive thinkers in the
Chinese intellectual sphere and in the policy sphere. Then Document 9 leaked and all of that got quashed and it turned. I put myself in Xi Jinping's shoes at the time and thought about what had happened.
And I think the decision probably went kind of like this, that letting markets play a decisive role in consolidating out excess capacity and flushing out weak companies was too risky, that it could lead to unintended outcomes and potentially even political instability. And that the decision was taken that central planning
could work, that it was actually superior to a market-based economy, but that it hadn't worked because the party did not heretofore, then too far,
have the leadership, the plan, and the party was undisciplined and corrupt. And for those reasons, it didn't work. And if Xi Jinping could fix that, he could fix it all. And I believe that is the plan we've seen. Have the plan, have the leadership, fix the party, and proceed. And I think we've seen that trajectory strengthen and tighten and harden since 2013. But to a point you made earlier,
I wouldn't necessarily attribute this all to Xi Jinping. I think this conservative element of the party has always been there, if not been dominantly there, sometimes obscured by progressives. But one of the things I guess you said, you asked me to kind of go back in time a little bit here and having been there for so long, where people have often asked, what are the most important changes you've noted?
And there have been many, of course, but what's remarkable to me are the things that are unchanged. The power structure, the control environment, and the nature of the bureaucracy and its engagement with the public sphere and the commercial sphere, not changed at all. It's always been there. You've talked a little bit about the birdcage economy. The birdcage has always been there.
Can you explain that concept, David? I'm not sure how many audience members would know that. So I think it was in 1991, maybe, that in opposition to Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up program, the conservative element in the party led by Chen Yun at the time, one of the Ba Lao, the eight immortals of the Chinese Communist Civil War and anti-Japanese Party,
rebellion, wrote an essay called The Birdcage Economy. And in a snapshot, it said that the market is a beautiful songbird and can create lovely music, but it must always be confined within the steel cage of the state lest it escape and wreak chaos. Now,
I would argue that the birdcage has always been there. We just didn't want to see it. So think about the early joint ventures, foreign joint ventures, or even joint ventures of today or licenses of today for business operations.
They are always temporary, transitional, and contained. So an automaker, a Western automaker gets a license for a JV. It's limited to two production models with a production quota and has a period of 20 years or 30 years.
Of course, in Hamburg or wherever, they pop the champagne. They say, we're going to go in there and our partner is going to love us. They're going to let us expand and dominate. And we're going to be so incredibly successful. They never get out of that. That is a containment. It's the birdcage. I was involved long, long ago in getting Bell South a telecom license. I think the first ever wholly owned foreign telecom license in China was
This was for a PBX operation at the Portman Shanghai in 1991. It's where all foreign business was kind of located in Shanghai at the time. We got the license for the PBX in the building, 20,000 line PBX. Of course, we thought we were going to be the next AT&T of China. We never got out of the Portman. We never got more than another line to the 20,000. That's the birdcage.
You've been watching closely this evolution of the play space, as you call it, for companies and investors. How has it evolved or devolved? And in what specific ways? Let's pick a benchmark of 2012. And I take your point that it's easy and it's a simpler narrative to hang all of this on Xi Jinping. But as you say, there are deep roots of skepticism of markets, or at least
seeing markets as not in a normative sense in a way that I think we can in the West, where markets are very much tied in in conceptions of liberalism and human dignity and agency. And I think the view of the Communist Party sees markets as much more operational tools
I think here, I might be misquoting, but our old colleague and friend, Andrew Polk of Trivium has a phrase, something to the effect of the Chinese don't think about efficiency of markets, they think about effectiveness of markets.
Does a market mechanism get me the outcome I want? And overcapacity is a great example of that, where it's not tooling markets to get pure efficiency. It's utilizing market mechanisms and quasi-market mechanisms like government guidance funds to ensure that you get the outcome that you're seeking. You're right. I mean, markets are almost used to create in early stages a hyper-efficiency, a hyper-competition rather, in an environment, let's say the EV space.
that to some extent tends to produce a competitive company or two, but at huge cost. So I think in EVs, for example, we can say that BYD and some others are very competitive.
But what about the other 150? And I think about the image I have in my mind. There are those piled up, rusted rental bikes in fields. And I think we're probably going to see that. So markets played a very important role initially in driving just hyper-competition
to super scale that sector. And it probably will yield a few very competitive companies, but at a very high cost. And eventually the government will come in and consolidate. And that's where the market sort of period will kind of end and the birdcage will descend. The reference David just made there, which I think you had to have been in Beijing,
or China in a certain two or three year period to experience the Mount Everest of Mobikes.
This is one of these startup, and there was a couple of them. I forget what the brand name of the yellow one was. I just remember the Mo Bike, but clearly a case of overcapacity. And you couldn't walk on the subway because there would be hundreds and thousands of these things piled up. And when the market crashed on these, there were apocalyptic pictures of areas outside of Beijing and Shanghai where tens of thousands of these bikes were just in a massive trash heap. But that was an interesting case study of
And I think you were the one who first described this paradigm to me, which I think of now all the time, and you were just describing, which is in some ways in emergent markets, China is one of the most hyper-capitalist places in the world where you have ultra-ruthless early market competition.
Partly low barriers to entry, partly because every locality and conglomerate wants to get in on this. You have hundreds of thousands of competitors, hyper-competitive, competing on price. So there's offers coming on your phone, discounts, and you wonder how any of these companies are making a profit. After some amount of time, a number of champions emerge from that gladiator competition and
And then suddenly, oftentimes the regulatory or political doors swing to come in and protect those companies, allow them to scale up domestically in a insulated environment where foreign competition is handicapped from taking these companies on. And once they've bulked up on steroids,
they can then go out into the global economy and compete. And that paradigm has replicated again and again and again and again, whether it's Mobike or now thinking of EVs. Phones, flat panel displays, central office equipment, switching systems, you name it.
And it's a unique approach to industrial policy. I think about the TDS CDMA, the Chinese 3G standard back in the mid 90s. The development process looked very European or even American, where there were all these university groups and private companies and others and VCs.
all trying to develop the new 3G standard. China wanted its own version of GSM at the time, so it could have a little more independence, nothing too divergent. So it would be interoperable with global systems. But like seven or eight groups emerged and competed very, very, very aggressively with one another to be the standard.
And it looked like a U.S. innovation environment. What changed is when the Chinese leadership then came in and selected Datong,
as the winner and just removed all the others. And then that became a state-owned interest that had huge prospects on stock markets and so on and so forth. And you saw the birdcage again descend. But before that, it looked like something very familiar. In fact, Peter Cowie and I talked a lot about that. The former dean of what was then the IRPS school at UCSD about how similar it looked
to a point and then changed.
So thinking about the business environment over this last decade, David, I realize I think I've interrupted you a few times if I've asked you this question. What do you think was driving changes in the regulatory market environment for foreign companies specifically? There's a whole other discussion about this is not just about foreign companies facing a more challenging domestic environment. I think a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs would say the exact same thing, right? So this is not, I'm not trying to make a distinction, but I think primarily you are engaged with
foreign MNCs and investors. So thinking over the last decade, what do you think was driving the changes on the market access environment? I know we've said Xi Jinping is a factor, but he's not the only factor. What else do you think was really shaping the play space? I think that it's probably true to say that the opportunity for Western multinationals and foreign investors was
really is joined at the hip with the plight and future of the private sector in China. As the private sector goes, so do foreign investors. So I don't see the current leading group as being anti-foreign investment. I think they see a more prescribed approach.
play space. I think the leadership is trying to force private companies to support kind of a whole of country industrial plan, and this would include foreign companies in the mix. So I would say there hasn't been any sort of clamp down on really the foreign opportunity, the foreign investor opportunity, but the sort of
tamped down or clamped down or birdcage constriction of the private sector has necessarily constrained the opportunity for foreign investors because it's a bellwether and they're the same. Yeah. So putting it another way, it's the private sector that is suffering, of which foreign investors are a component of it. But the story is
Similarly challenging for Chinese domestic entrepreneurs as truly private companies as well are also facing significant headwinds in China. Precisely. And also the household sector and genuine Chinese household consumption matters to foreign investors. That's who they serve.
So they primarily serve private companies in the industrial space. That's where foreign companies do well because those companies will tend to select products with the best performance and price, whereas state-owned companies tend to have a different purchasing strategy.
process that's a lot more difficult and picky and demanding and margin crushing, really. So this really matters, the household sector and the private sector to foreign investors. And we've talked a little bit about the political economy here. I've been thinking quite a lot about this sort of myopia the current leadership seems to have about new quality productive forces and the role of innovative technological development in particular.
And actually stepping back a bit, one thing that always intrigued me about the way the leaders used to talk about China going from the late 80s up until 2008 plus was that it was an economy in transition. And it begged the question, we used to talk about this, a transition to what? I think there was always a discomfort with the conservative element of the leadership around China.
the autonomy of markets and the autonomy of the household sector and the idea that elevating household wealth and elevating private sector wealth would necessarily at some time come with political expectations and that that was dangerous and that that needed to be tamped down and maybe taken off the table, Jude.
And if you take it off the table, what are you left with? You're left with technology development, bright, shiny objects. We're going to do moon shots. We're going to do Mars shots. We're going to do deep sea exploration in the Arctic poles. And people will love this because they're proud of their country. But I think one thing that explains this pivot is because once you take household elevation and private sector elevation off the table, it's what's left.
Yeah. Can I ask you to drill down on that consumption piece a little bit more? This is something you have been thinking about and writing about in the conference board. China Center has been doing a lot of great work on this for a long time. There had been an understanding that at some point the leadership had to, and indeed, the
the leadership wanted to transition the economy from primarily export-led low-end manufacturing to a more domestically oriented consumption economy. Is it the case that they just have been unable to achieve this transformation? Are they unwilling to? Are they unwilling to make some of the trade-offs that they would need to make to transition? Again, this has been the
a main theme of Michael Pettis for a very long time. How do you see the challenge on the consumption piece of this? Unwilling or unable? Unwilling.
I think the pathways to elevating consumption and driving really potentially a new golden age in Chinese growth and development are well known. The Article 4 consultation of the IMF that came out this year again in March or April outlines a number of fiscal and tax and other reforms that would
transfer wealth from the state and corporate sector to the household sector. You say Michael Pettis has been on this for years. It's all very doable and in fact, empirically knowable. I mean, China could pick and choose the things it would want to do to change the calculus here.
I would say that it's politically unacceptable at this stage. And we really have a threefold problem here. One is that the household sector is underpaid. Households receive a very low share of national income in wages and in entitlements. We could go into some detail there. The second is that the household sector is exploited. The wealth of households is
fund banks in wealth-eroding savings accounts that are below the inflation rate until very recently because inflation is so low in China. They also buy properties that fund the local governments that are theoretically meant to provide services in the jurisdictions they live. So if you think about it, at a big picture level, the wealth of the household sector funds the entire investment-led growth model.
It's an exploitative model. And China is not the only one guilty of this, not by any means. But it's uniquely unsocialist in a strange way. So, you know, that's an irony that I think could use some poking around in. And last but not least, Scott Rosell's very good work, Invisible China,
really points out that 640 million Chinese people in the current workforce are low income and low education with ninth grade educations or below and low quality educations at that. And that basically positions two thirds of the consumer market in a middle income trap.
So, you know, what we have in China right now is a group of probably 300 million wealthy Chinese people. It's a big, important market, but it's 9% of the population and it's the aggregate that's the problem. The other 91% has very low consumption capacity. Why is this politically challenging, David? This is where I think you really need to think through incentives.
Because it would seem very aligned with the common prosperity agenda. Why not? But I think at the end of the day, increasing the wealth of the household sector will create political expectations that the government finds unacceptable. You know, I can give you a very real example, although it's incredibly anecdotal. But I was doing a lot of work in Taipei in the late 80s and early 90s.
in Taiwan and I remember when it had its huge surge of IT growth and tremendous economic success and everybody went and bought a car. Everybody. So it went from like no traffic to the worst traffic imaginable. And initially people were really happy nonetheless because their car was probably the most comfortable living space they had. And so they just sit in their air conditioned car and for hours and hours in traffic and it was fine.
That lasted for about two years before people started getting really pissed off and demanding the government fix it. And I think that's the problem. I was just thinking, and this is maybe an unfair question to ask because we would be speculating an answer and Xi Jinping is not here to rebut. If he could snap his finger and tomorrow the per capita GDP of China was on par with Switzerland, would Xi Jinping take that?
And I wonder if they think that would create far more headaches than they're willing to deal with. I think they think that it would create too many headaches. But let me give you, because I've been thinking about solutions that might align with the party's control function. And imagine this. We know that China has a digital currency that they've piloted that looks like it may even be mature and ready for use.
What if they transferred very cost-effectively money into the phones, the digital wallets of the 600 million low-income, low-educated wallets of people? They've got the digital system there. If the people don't spend it, they lose it.
So this concern about saving is it goes away. And second, with the social credit score system linkage, they could actually directed towards patriotic consumption, restaurants and other things and not Apple iPhones. This seems like something that could be done and satisfy a whole bunch of problems. But thinking about it in a very, very perhaps Xi Jinping way. Yeah.
I think you've been studying Xi Jinping too long, David. I wanted to ask you a few other questions. One is a concept that you have talked about when we were in Beijing together was this conception of reform versus reform. I have used this subsequently, but I want to, in public here, give intellectual property rights protection to the originator of it. I find it a useful way of thinking about
how the leadership group thinks about making changes
to the administrative regulatory system. Can you just talk through the distinction between reform and reform and why it matters now? Yeah, well, it kind of came up a little bit as a joke at the time, but you and I were studying this shift towards a more statist development plan and a veer away from opening and reform as the fundamental policy precept.
But yet in all of the documents that were issued from sort of 2014 on, reform featured so heavily. It was always reform this, reform, reform, reform. And I thought, am I just being cynical? Is this incredibly Orwellian where they're using the word, but it actually doesn't mean anything? It's just meaningless?
Or does it mean something different? And I began to think of it that way. I mean, reform to a Western ear means liberalization, marketization, deregulation, and so on and so forth.
But reform in a Chinese context could mean something as simple as further perfecting the state-led market economy, as Wu Jinglian, the economist, called it, which I think is a great way of terming it. And then I started testing that thesis, because I think once you figure out what incentives are at work, I think you can piece these things together. And it was really as simple as that, a lost-in-translation issue.
I'd like to now ask you unfairly to dust off your crystal ball and peer into the murky future. You've been following incredibly closely this evolution of political economy and how the leadership thinks about the private sector, markets, state control, state capital. You've also been writing and thinking a lot about how the external environment shapes Xi Jinping and how Xi Jinping shapes the external environment.
How do you think about what the future looks like for China's economy over the next decade? Do you think there is a possible point at which things have gotten so bad or the imperfections or pathologies of this party state control framework for governing the economy just runs out of gas and there's appetite for more substantial change?
Or is it possible that this thing can go on further than we've thought and there are maybe less, there are more concerning visions of the future we need to begin entertaining? I think we've become so used to, after four decades of reform and opening, imagining that the leadership can, when it puts its mind to it, just basically fix things broken in the economy. It can pull rabbits out of the hat. It's been doing that for so long. We've just become used to that. How do you think we should think about what the future of China could look like?
Yeah, that is an unfair question. Firstly, the Chinese manufacturing sector is incredibly diverse and innovative and competitive and is not something that will deflate quickly. That said, the local government finance situation and the real estate situation is really, really bad. It is bad. And, you know, on the investment side of real estate,
We haven't seen the fall off in investment that would match the fall off in transactions and sales and new starts in home values, which tells me that real estate investment upstream, i.e. the acquisition of
of land from city governments and the construction of new commercial and other complexes, that's going to come down a lot. It's come down about 10%. And that 10% has been filled with stepped up infrastructure investment and with hard tech manufacturing investment and EVs and intermediate industrial goods and solar and so forth. But if real estate comes down like I think it will, investment that is, that gap is going to become
too big to fill. So right now, I think the government feels pretty happy about its competitiveness in these big three new industries, but they're only a partial solution. And I think this realization will eventually increase
realized. They think they can export a lot of this production, but they already export $4 trillion a year. They're the largest exporter and everyone's running a surplus with them. There's just not that much headroom for them to grow it. So that's going to be limited by trade concerns. And the global South's not going to absorb that. There's just no way. So anyway, there's a fundamental problem and there's a wall you can see looming. It could take
a long time to get there, or if local city finances are really as problematic as some believe it could be a lot sooner. I want to note there that your point earlier about most often the Chinese government kind of comes in and fixes it, it always assumes unlimited funding capacity.
which to date China kind of has had. But I would argue we're reaching constraints there. Why doesn't the government spend more on stimulus? Well, one answer would be the money isn't there, or it would be significantly inflationary and would undermine the value of the RMB. So there are some hard constraints around China's ability to fix things through
massive capital aggregation and deployment in the old way. So I think sooner or later, this reckoning will be upon us. And the $16 trillion question is, you know what, then as a leap of faith here, I believe we will see
necessity drive a change of direction towards a more marketization-oriented pathway, not the same as what we were on before in the sort of Dang and Zhu Rongji era, but more like it than unlike it. But admittedly, that's a leap of faith. The alternative is just too stark to imagine. We're really talking then about a very isolationist, very kind of North Korea-like
trajectory, which just doesn't seem feasible to me. I hope you're right. Although you've heard the dark joke that I've heard some say in China of, we once thought North Korea was our past, and now we worry that North Korea is our future. I had not heard that. That is dark.
David, thank you so much for taking time out to share your thoughts again. And thank you for all that you've done to shape how I think about this. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you, Jude. And keep up the good work. The podcast is terrific.
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